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Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver is a very special case: it’s a film that was made because the people involved all made large financial sacrifices and stuck to them for a long time. The entire above-the-line cost for Scorsese, De Niro, Michael and Julia Phillips and Tony Bill, Peter Boyle, Jodie Foster, and myself was probably around $150,000; people were doing it for next to nothing. We were all young enough to want to do something that will last. De Niro told me, when we were talking about whether the film would make any money, that he felt it was a film people would be watching fifty years from now, and that whether everybody watched it next year wasn’t important. That’s how we came to it, and that’s why we didn’t make any compromises; we figured if we’re going to compromise on money, we’re certainly not going to compromise on anything else. There’s nothing in the film that was put there at the studio’s insistence. There are things we disagree about, things I would have done differently. —Paul Schrader interviewed by Richard Thompson